ViaVoice on Debian

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

This is really for the archives. It describes how to get ViaVoice
running under a Debian Etch aka testing distribution using alsa
sound. 

1. Geet the IBM ViaVoice run-time environment (see Ramans earlier mail
   on where to get a run-time licensed environment for $40). 

2. The run-time environment comes in a tar file which you need to
   unpack into a temporary directory. When you untar the file, you
   will find two RPM files i.e.
		ibmtts_rte-6.7-4.2.i386.rpm
		ibmtts_rte_XX_XX-6.7-4.0.i386.rpm
   Note: in the second package I have replaced the language code in
   the name with XX_XX. In my case, the code is En_GB.

3. You cannot install the RPMs with the setup.sh script provided
   because it tries to use the rpm command, which will fail with
   errors about unsatisfied dependencies. Therefore, you need to use
   Debians alien package to convert the RPMs into DEB packages. Also
   note that its very important to install the RPMs in the correct
   order. The main TTS engine must be installed before the language
   files. To do the install do

	alien --script -i ibmtts_rte-*.rpm
    alien --script -i ibmtts_rte_*.rpm

   Note: The subtle difference between these two commands is that in
   the first one, the character before the * is -, while in the second
   command the character before the * is the _.

4. Once this is done, you should be up and ready to build the server
   shared libraries. Note that you need to ensure you have installed
   the libasound2-dev package if you want to compile the alsa version
   of the shared library. See the documentation in the linux-outloud
   directory on instructions for doing this. 

I have noticed that ViaVoice does crash with the alsa driver on rare
occasions, but restarts itself very quickly. I did not notice this
while I was running using the alsa OSS compatibility layer. I'm not
sure why this is yet and it could be something odd on my system. I'm
using a SoundBlaster Live card and can use either the oss
compatibility layer or native alsa. However, I've heard that the oss
compatibility layer doesn't work well for some sound cards.

Tim

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help"